Lunar New Year casts glow at Arts House

The first installation to be shown in a new downstairs exhibition space at Arts House is an atmospheric meditation on chance and life that has been programmed with “a nod to the Lunar New Year”.

From the darkened basement of the North Melbourne Town Hall come the wavering strains of traditional Vietnamese music, which overlap and give way to the thrum of a humid rainforest, then a hypnotic electronic beat.

On a large screen in the new Arts House Supper Room, artist Rel Pham has created shifting dreamlike sequences of virtual Vietnamese jungles merging with banks of neon poker machines, Asian altars and other images and scenes of chance.

Other installations in the room feature flashing neon symbols and mad scatterings of TAB-style betting slips.

They reflect Rel Pham’s feelings about luck, fate, place, identity and how the world keeps moving after tragedy.

As a child he often drew on the back of betting slips while his father filled them out, he says, and his father’s death and an absence of rituals to deal with it was the jumping off point for the work, When Your Number’s Up.

“I wanted to explore how people try to find meaning in chaos,” he told North West City News.

“The I Ching and the algorithm feel like the same impulse, both promise answers that make the future feel less random.”

One-hundred-and-forty people turned up for an Arts House Neighbourhood Gathering on February 12, including the opening of the Supper Room's inaugural exhibition.

The space has been earmarked for video-focused installations, programming manager Naomi Velaphi explained, with the idea of opening the building up more and “making sure there is something on for people to see during the day.”

Among other fresh initiatives, the venue has pushed its occasional get-togethers – where locals can enjoy a drink and snack, hear artists talk and mill around with them – to an evening time that might allow more people to come along.

Arts House is also trying to unearth more local artists, Ms Velaphi says, and “creative minds who are interested in exploring things.”

New ground is certainly being explored in the venue’s upcoming Opera for the Dead | 祭歌 , which also features themes around death, and animation by Rel Pham.

The “modern Chinese cyber-opera”, which comes fresh from sold-out seasons at the Sydney Festival and last year’s OzAsia and Asia TOPA, has been described as “part installation, part concert, part collective act of remembrance”.

One of its Chinese-Australian creators, award-winning guzheng – or Chinese zither – virtuoso Mindy Meng Wang, has said it was about “finding beauty and connection in grief and the light in the darkness.”

Her collaborator, “boundary-pushing” sound designer Monica Lim, described it as an opportunity for audiences to “experience music, movement and technology in a way that mirrors how memory and mourning are layered in our own lives”.

The opera, together with When Your Number’s Up and a window display of Year of the Fire Horse-themed illustrations by Malaysian-Australian artist Pei Chi, has been programmed with “a bit of a nod to the Lunar New Year,” Ms Velaphi says.

When Your Number’s Up is a free installation showing at the Arts House Supper Room in the North Melbourne Town Hall from 10am to 4pm Monday to Friday until March 6.

Opera for the Dead | 祭歌 runs from February 26 to March 1. •